Four businesses, a college and a city told their stories of implementing wellness programs, first using HMRC's assessment, then taking that information and implementing wellness programs.

The overriding message was that investing now in wellness and behavior change reaps benefits later. That message was reinforced by studies showing costs go down when employees adopt wellness principles.

"Employers have been paying for sickness since WWII and look where it's gotten them," said Edington. "Health costs are more than just the medical, pharmaceutical, disability ... it's productivity, lost earnings, cost to business."

One of the presenters, Crown Equipment Corp., a private Ohio-based company with 6,000 employees in the U.S., gave results in dollars and cents.

Crown representatives said the company could save more than $800,000 in just medical care and insurance costs if just over half the employees followed a wellness program and decreased or controlled several risk factors.

Risk factors include smoking, high blood pressure and body weight among others.

U-M has partnered with the 300-member National Business Group on Health to work on warehousing and analysis on data the group's companies feed into the Employers Measure of Productivity, Absence and Quality database.

Having reports in hand from a third party like U-M helps administrators of these programs gain senior management support by justifying plan cost and pointing to their effectiveness.

Some of the contributors to the database include Honeywell, General Motors, PepsiCo, FedEx and Coors, to name a few.

U-M and the EMPAQ will release this year's summary research report at the end of March that will allow employers to compare specific program costs, lost time and productivity with their peers, said Amanda Cyr, HMRC project manager.

This will allow them to see if they are paying more in disability, insurance and other employee-related costs and take action if necessary, she said.

Comparing wellness today to safety initiatives of 50 years ago, Cyr said, back then employers realized if they spent money on safety fewer people would get hurt and eventually savings would outstrip initial costs.

"Wellness is starting to come around to that," said Cyr. "I think that companies are feeling the pressure just because of the increasing health care costs and I don't think there's a way around it any more. You can increase prices only so much ...

"And from a quality of life standpoint too, if you have employees that are happy with their jobs and healthy and morale is high, this kind of initiative helps keep good employees."